


Slow, Ongoing Metamorphosis

by yikesola



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2019, But also, Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, Memory Lane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 04:01:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18490915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikesola/pseuds/yikesola
Summary: They see things at home for ages before they eventually show the internet. Dan’s curly hair, Phil’s glasses, Dan’s hoop earring, Phil’s quiff. And even once they’re ready to show, they do it slowly.A fic about changes and when we get to see them.





	Slow, Ongoing Metamorphosis

They see things at home for ages before they eventually show the internet. Dan’s curly hair, Phil’s glasses, Dan’s hoop earring, Phil’s quiff. A test run, a comfortable controlled environment where they can decide if they even like these shifts in their appearance before unleashing it onto the internet to gauge and value and draw and write.

And even once they’re ready to show, they do it slowly. A liveshow, an Instagram post. Maybe a gaming video or two. Low stakes, things that give them the right to revert back into their branded appearances if they need to.

Fortunately, they haven’t felt the need to take those outs. They haven’t gone back to the days of square hair and birds’ nests yet.

They’ve each spent so long memorising every dip and crease of the other that these changes just present a new thing to note. It’s been that way from the beginning, when they’d skype and show off scars and freckles and birthmarks over the grainy screens for the other to catalogue forever. When they’d finally see each other in person and trace the lines of their bodies to commit the feeling under their fingertips to memory.

There are aspects that stick out as favourites, even if they love each other wholly, down to every cell.

Dan loves Phil’s points— the point of his brow bone and the point where his hair triangles and the point of his bird nose. Phil loves Dan’s curves— the curve of his throat and the curve of his laugh lines and the curve of his full bottom lip.

But Phil has curves that Dan loves as well, the curve of his cupid’s bow and his rebellious section of hair that wants to curve separate from his quiff. And Dan also has points that Phil loves, the hidden point of his widow’s peak and his chipped tooth that creates its own point to draw Phil’s eye when he laughs.

There’s changes— a body doesn’t live through near a decade, even beside another body, without experiencing changes.

Dan has grown taller over the years; taller than Phil even if he is determined to hunch and slouch and continue glancing upwards as he did back in the beginning. And Phil’s shoulders are as broad as ever, but he finds over time that being spooned by Dan’s newly broad chest allows him to sometimes feel almost delicate… a near-fragility he wouldn’t have felt comfortable with in days gone by. These days it’s nice; it’s nice because Dan’s holding him.

These changes, though they bore witness to each and every one, often manage to surprise them. _We look like fetuses!_ they scream, watching an old video. _Oh my god, look at my hair!_ every ancient picture prompts.

They’re tagged in gifsets comparing ten years of changes side by side. They’re tagged in art that shows their 2019 iterations having conversations with their 2009 counterparts. Conversations that are filled with hope, filled with “it gets better” in regards to YouTube and their mental health and the world’s general acceptance of a relationship that looks like theirs— spoken, inferred, or otherwise. They show each other some of the giftsets; they press _like_ on some of the art.

They’re a little shell-shocked sometimes by changes they hadn’t noticed themselves, like how Phil’s cheeks have sharped over the years or how Dan’s gone through like fifteen puberties and still manages to be confused for 16 years old in American airports and Indian bars.

But they laugh; they always laugh half in nervousness and half in accession when the audience remembers something clearer than they do. They might be control freaks, but a brain can only contain so much information. How anyone expected Dan to remember Phil buying Kath a stuffed monkey in a cage still baffles him, but the audience treats it like a softball answer. So sometimes there isn’t much to do but laugh.

It’s the give and take they have, the push and pull after a decade of building an audience. Some have been there all the while; others have come and gone.

Some are learning for the first time that Phil hadn’t always quiffed his hair, some never stuck around long enough to see Dan’s curls. Some saw the Instagram post with Dan’s hoop earring and prayed it was there to stay while still being unsure if it’d make an appearance in the next one. And some watched years of Phil’s weekly liveshows where occasionally the glasses made a casual appearance, but never really believed he’d film an AmazingPhil video wearing them, until one day he did.

But at home, inside their shared series of flats, Dan and Phil each saw these varying states forever before their test runs.

Phil saw Dan’s curls as they Skyped one summer day in 2009 immediately after Dan got out of the shower. And Dan saw a prototype of Phil’s quiff as he woke up wrapped in his arms to a mid-October Manchester morning.

They’ve shown each other questionable fashion choices they thought for sure would look cool when bought in the shops and which resolutely never saw the light of day, for good reason. They’ve seen each other ill, and tired, and in their lowest lows in a way they know isn’t going to be posted for public consumption.

Sometimes Dan sees silver-grey hairs peeking through Phil’s ginger-rooted jet black strands in between dyes, and he counts them, and sometimes plucks one out to tease Phil about the old wives’ tale that predicts two more growing in its place. And sometimes Phil teases Dan after a few days between shaves that he’s got more stubble than ever— that he must’ve finally gone through that particular puberty, and that they can finally grow those matching beards they’re always joking about to replace the matching fringes they’ve long ago abandoned.

When Dan posts his first selfie of 2019 in the last days of March, there is a joyous outpour from their viewers at finally seeing his face, but there is also more than anything a sense of shock. Shock at how he’s changed since their audience last saw him.

Phil tries to see it from their perspective, but it’s difficult when he has sat beside Dan for each of the intervening days. His lips are less chapped, the shadows under his eyes less purpled, the post-tour exercise they’ve both taken up again and its effects are more or less evident.

Some comments worry over him. Those surprise Phil more than anything. And Phil spends a fair amount of his life worrying over Dan.

Phil posts some spring merch teases in his instastory and the comments about his arms makes Dan laugh. Because Dan has been beating that drum for years— _Phil, your biceps are wonderful and you have nothing to be ashamed of_ and _You literally don’t have weak arms_ , to the notion that Phil has noodle limbs, _You have, like quite big arms_.

Maybe when they’d posted videos with more regularity, these changes appeared to the viewers as slowly as they appear to one another. It’s only when looking back that they realise how much has changed.

And that’s only including the physical, the arguably least important aspects of what they share— Dan and Phil have nearly a decade of changes to their internal landscape that are intentionally withheld from public consumption until they are deemed ready. And just as with the changes in appearance, these are often offered slowly. An instastory where Phil expresses an opinion: this movie was bad, this shirt is ugly, this shower gel is masculinity on crack. A liveshow where Dan explains the difference between seeing himself as a YouTuber and seeing himself as an entertainer, as someone who creates content.

Slowly, slowly changes are trickled in. That way the earth won’t shatter, but has time to adjust to their weight without buckling.

They’re so grateful for the other person sitting beside them to be a sounding board before changes, big and small, are let out into the world. They’re so glad for that litmus test. It’s such a relief to have that practice run. To have someone say _Yes, you look good_ or _No, no, it doesn’t matter_.

It makes those eventual reveals, of changes and losses and gains, just a bit less terrifying. It’s always been a comfort. And it’ll keep being a comfort, for the next ten years, and the next…

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading— come say hi on [tumblr](http://yikesola.tumblr.com/post/184233473044/slow-ongoing-metamorphosis) !


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